Tag
#eisenhower
2 articles
The U-2 Incident: The Spy Plane That Wrecked a Summit
On the morning of 1 May 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft — a strange, glider-winged spy plane built to fly higher than any fighter could reach — was cruising at some 70,000 feet over the heart of the Soviet Union, its cameras photographing military installations, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploded near it and sent it spinning out of the sky. The pilot, a CIA contract flyer named Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to earth and was captured alive near the city of Sverdlovsk. What followed was one of the most humiliating episodes in the history of American Cold War diplomacy. Believing the pilot dead and the plane destroyed, the United States put out a cover story: that a NASA 'weather research' plane had strayed off course after its pilot reported oxygen trouble. Then the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sprang his trap, revealing that the pilot was alive, had confessed, and that the wreckage — cameras, film, and all — was in Soviet hands. President Eisenhower was exposed in a lie before the world, and, breaking with precedent, ultimately acknowledged that the United States had been conducting espionage overflights. The incident detonated days before a long-planned summit in Paris, which it duly destroyed, ending a fragile thaw and plunging the Cold War back into deep freeze. This is the story of the U-2 incident — the secret program, the shootdown, the collapsing lie, and the summit it took down with it.
The Bay of Pigs
On the night of Sunday, April 16, 1961, approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the United States Central Intelligence Agency embarked from a staging port at Puerto Cabezas on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast aboard chartered freighters of the García Line. They were Brigade 2506 — the operational unit codename derived from the serial number of the brigade's first combat fatality during the Guatemalan training phase. Their objective: an amphibious landing on the southern coast of Cuba at Bahía de Cochinos — the Bay of Pigs — followed by the establishment of a beachhead from which a provisional Cuban government-in-exile would be declared, internal opposition to Fidel Castro's two-and-a-half-year-old revolutionary government would be encouraged, and conventional U.S. military intervention could, if events warranted, be requested under cover of a civil war already in progress. The plan had been developed under the Eisenhower administration from March 1960; the operational variant executed in April 1961 had been authorized by President John F. Kennedy, in office for 87 days, on April 4 and again on April 16. The operation was, in its own operational terms, a comprehensive failure: the air strikes on Cuban airfields scheduled for the morning of April 15 destroyed only a fraction of Castro's air force; the landings on April 17 met immediate, sustained, and well-organized resistance; the second wave of U.S. air support was cancelled by Kennedy on April 16-17; the brigade was overrun at the beach within 72 hours. Brigade casualties: 114 killed, 1,189 captured. The captured personnel were held in Cuba until December 1962 when they were exchanged for approximately $53 million in U.S.-supplied food and medicine. Within weeks of the operation, Kennedy had requested the resignations of CIA Director Allen Dulles, CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. Within eighteen months, the Soviet decision to install medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuban territory — a decision Nikita Khrushchev later attributed in part to the demonstration of U.S. willingness to attempt military overthrow — had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to within hours of nuclear exchange. The Bay of Pigs is the foundational documented operational failure of the U.S. intelligence community and the immediate institutional precursor to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
2 files · end of the line